Prototyping in Service Design takes a strategic form
Service design, at its core, tailors interactions between consumers and service providers through mediums that are designed to deliver a service experience. Our work as service designers, is to connect internal and external actors across business ecosystems. In order to get there we constantly experiment and explore multiple pathways to solve for the interactions mentioned above. It is through prototyping that we experiment and build our creative muscle. By doing that, we allow people to experience a possible future representation of what we are designing for.
Prototyping techniques in service design go beyond the definition that you usually hear about in the marketplace. These techniques rely on a combination of academic principles with real-world experiments that are able to demonstrate actionable business results. I’ll go over some examples that in some shape or form, prototyping has provided value to those who interacted with it.
One important thing to keep in mind is that, when we talk about prototyping we also take into consideration different levels of fidelity (low to high). I say this because they are intrinsically connected. These levels of fidelity will depend on the resources you have available at the time you are setting the stage to prototyping. However, there are external factors such as organizational culture, organizational structure, and time that will influence which prototyping technique you are going to use, how many times you are going to be able to iterate and how many people you can recruit to provide feedback.
Let me start by sharing a definition around what is prototyping and how is it applied in Service Design:
"Prototyping is not prototype. Prototyping is an activity where a future situation is explored or evaluated. Prototyping can also be the activity of showing a prototype, to communicate with people that are involved in design activities or people that will somehow be affected by the outcome of design activities. Activities such as role-playing and enactments are considered prototyping, when the activities are conducted to explore or evaluate a future situation. Prototyping is the use of prototypes to explore, evaluate or communicate in design…Prototyping is a way to manage uncertainty."
- Representing Future Situations of Service: Prototyping in Service Design by John Blomkvist, 2014
According to Bakerville & Myers (2015), prototyping sets the stage for iterative design, a return to earlier processes to restart the data gathering, or alternatively to shift to a new context to provide experience with the design processes in multiple contexts.
This activity can transform an intangible vision into a tangible representation of a future desired situation. By creating opportunities for people to interact, use and provide input via prototypes, you are not only providing conditions to pressure test ideas but you are also, co-creating and incorporating multiple perspectives into your design.
What is interesting about what is said above is that, similar to other disciplines (UX design, UI design, visual design) or collaborative processes (design thinking or design sprint workshops), service designers use prototyping to explore, evaluate, and communicate (Blomkvist & Holmlid, 2010).
However, I would argue that when you use prototyping techniques to communicate strategy, especially in service design projects, it takes a different form. This means that a prototype in service design is not only a thing, like a storyboard, a product, or a user interface; it can also be a meeting of people, or an assemblage as it has been called (Wilkie, 2010).
To combine the academic side of things mentioned above with the actual practice of prototyping, here are some of the ways on how I’ve used prototyping techniques in service design projects:
An accessible low fidelity prototype that requires little to no time is paper prototyping. For example, when I was working at Sparks Grove, we used paper prototyping as a workshop activity to craft future-state headlines in a newspaper format. Participants described the experience that customers should have by using paper cards, photos and handwritten headers. During the activity, they were asked to think: “If I was going to read the main headline of my company newspaper in 2040, what would it say?”. In this way, they were thinking strategically about a desired experience and conveying their strategy in a visual way.
One example of a mid fidelity prototype is to use a technique called service storming. This technique requires teamwork and the logistics around how to convey a desired experience in a theatrical format. It requires from the participants to assign team roles such as writers, actors, sound effects-person, visual prompts-person, director, assistant director, etc. And the main thing is to be able to design a scripted scene to act out moments or key interactions of that desired experience. This allows participants to build empathy for customer/employees while trying to meet their needs (e.g. what we want them to feel/think/do), think through details (e.g. wayfinding), team capabilities (e.g. people skills, technological and/or budget constraints) and how the experience flow should feel like (e.g. experience principles). For example, during an internal project, we needed to think through an event experience so, we used this technique to act out what we wanted the guests to do, where they should/could go and, how the space should enable guests to feel welcomed and bring the desired experience outcomes to life in a very seamless way.
These techniques mentioned so far, can be used in many different ways to accommodate your design needs. There is one more example that I’ve recently tried out with my team at Harmonic Design that speaks to my prototyping point of view. This was a mix of a couple of techniques, one of them I’ve previously mentioned in a post called “Walking the Creative Wall” — open studio — and the other one is storyboarding. These aren’t necessarily “traditional” prototyping techniques per sey but, somehow, when used together, ended up “revealing a concrete way of showing a relationship between design and use” of a high fidelity strategic framework for an organization. We did this by first working with the organization to select their most impactful customer experience moments and we took that and represented each of these moments based on current-state customer data. We compared and contrasted with a range of scenarios that would provide a desired vision on how they could respond to the current customer needs. Once these moments were laid out in a storyboard format, we created a gallery and asked people from around the organization and across leadership to walk through it and provide input on how they would respond to the where seeing and how they would use it to measure their organization success. It had received such great reviews that the gallery ended up staying for more than it was intended, it became a reference for the organization as a reminder of where they are right now and where they want to be in the future.
Hopefully by understanding how to work around the spectrum of the prototype fidelity and techniques, you are able to find different ways to bridge the gap between an intangible thought to tangible actions. Experiment and build your prototyping muscle by trying out different techniques that could help you speed up the process of buy-in amongst your team, stakeholders, and organizations. Prototyping in service design can save people’s time, money, energy and, as a result, quickly shows the value of a viable strategic solution.
